I think that if Mac had been the dominant desktop platform, native desktop apps would still be more popular. For one thing, Mac emphasizes UI consistency more t

I think that if Mac had been the dominant desktop platform, native desktop apps would still be more popular. For one thing, Mac emphasizes UI consistency more than Windows; observe that even Microsoft Office and the (now abandoned) Windows Live Essentials desktop apps don't use native Win32 controls. For that matter, even a lot of Windows utilities don't use standard Win32 coontrols for everything; Microsoft has an internal GUI toolkit called DirectUser that is used in various forms across several MS products. And this brings me to a reason why native Windows apps aren't popular among developers today: lack of a single good native GUI solution. Win32 is plain ugly, and shows its age. Windows Forms was stillborn, as Joel Spolsky said in "How Microsoft Lost the API War". WPF may be good for .NET apps, but Microsoft doesn't use it in their flagship products; that's hardly a vote of confidence. And now there's WinRT/Metro, which is cool... if you want to ignore the large installed base of pre-Win8 users. Is it any wonder that so many developers just decided to use web technologies instead?